1. U S 81 - 5 CHRISTIANITY GURURAJ: You know, this Nasradin he was also a great humorist, and he wanted to play a joke on the pastor. So... [LAUGHTER] so he listened to the sermon and after the talk he told the pastor, he says, "I know of every word you spoke. I've got it in a b ook." The pastor was quite surprised. He says, "What? All my talks are totally original, I don't get them from books." So Nasradin insisted that "I've got every word in a book." So the pastor says, "Send me the book." So next day Nastrodin sends him t he book. It was a dictionary. [LAUGHTER] Good. What shall we talk about today? DOUG: Beloved Guruji, the Bible speaks of the glory of God, [INAUDIBLE]. Could you speak to us about it? GURURAJ: Um hm. Fine. Any other question? I could take two or three and put them all in one. DOUG: It wouldn't necessarily pertain to that particular question. Unless somebody had one [INAUDIBLE] that you could ask Guruji at the same time. GURURAJ: Because that question is actually is going to be a poem. DOUG: Okay, [INAUDIBLE]. VOICE: [INAUDIBLE] in Christian religion it's praise glory to God in the highest and on Earth peace, good will to men. This is especially used at our Christmas time. This is why, somehow, a separation between God on high and men on earth which seems to run a bit at odds with your teachings. If you'd like to elaborate on that. GURURAJ: Right. Good. The glory of God and what it signifies, and how could it be at odds with our teachings. Now, Christianity primarily is based more on bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga meaning devotion. Now, when any theology is based on devotion, then there always has to be the "I" and "thou" aspect. Now, this I and thou aspect is very necessary for the wayfarer. For the person on the path has to have a goal. So what greater goal could there be than to discover the glory of the Lord? So these bhakti yoga, jnana yoga, and all these are combined in Christianity. But because of certain times and for certain people, certain paths were more emphasized. And bhakti yoga, as Carl would know so well, is very

2. U S 81 - 5 necessary for a person to be in tune, for bhakti is nothing else but devotion. Now, one can never be devoted to something totally abstract. So therefore we symbolize that abstraction or the abstract idea in the concrete form of Jesus, so there is someone that one could be devoted to, or even worship. Now, this being a necessary path for most people, what are the mechanics? That is what we have to discover. Now, the mechanics would be simple, by a strict observation of certain of the precepts, certain injunctions, and certain laws laid down to help us on the path. Now, how valid are these precepts? That cannot be determined generally, but it must be determined individually, that how it applies to each an d every individual that is on the path. So having the goal in sight, like driving to Los Angeles, you know that you have to reach Los Angeles, you are just not going to get into the car and drive. Now having the goal in mind, you would know what road to take. And the road you take would be the one most convenient to you. If you live in downtown Los Angeles, perhaps another road would be good for you. If you live in Van Nuys, perhaps there would be a shorter road to Van Nuys. So bhakti, or bhakti yoga, which is essentially Christianity, shows you all these various paths of devotion and worship. Therein is also contained a lot of ritualism. And to the person that has passed the necessity, that has no need for ritual, can still be involved in that devotio n. Now, ritual, too, plays its part. The part it plays is this, that it prepares your mind, brings you into a certain mood. Brings you into a certain mood. And that you will find in Hinduism and Buddhism as well; where you are required... as you get up in the morning you have your bath, which is a preparation for worshiping. Bodily cleanliness is important. And you are, because you are going to sit down to worship and do your prayers, while you are having the bath, cleansing the body, your mind is also filled with the teachings of that, the "Thou" of God. So it becomes a certain kind of conditioning. Now, with the Hindus, for example, the lamp has to be put in a certain place. The lamp has to be cleaned personally and polished. Now, while you are do ing all that, your mind is slowly led to higher and higher thoughts or better thoughts, and then you put your flowers down with that devotion. Now, with this buildup that is taking place in you, you are tuning yourself, you are preparing your mind. Your mind is going into a devotional mood, whereby when you pray the prayer becomes more effective. And this we find in the Catholic faith, in Hinduism, and most practically in all other branches of the Christian religion. And with this, one always has the glo ry and the majesty of God in mind. Now, this glory and majesty of God starts with a mental concept. Because not having known God, you idealize Him to be something really super, beyond man. So you are then worshiping an ideal. Now, this is good. At le ast you have something to clutch onto. You're climbing the stairs and you have the rail to hold onto lest you slip. You see. So having the various ideas of God, that He being all powerful, all merciful, all compassionate, all the greatest virtues and th e greatest things man could ever think about.... Now, is He all that merciful? Is He all that powerful or all that compassionate, remains a question, because you have not yet known the glory of God. But it helps you by tuning your

3. U S 81 - 5 thoughts to what is co mpassion, to what is mercy, to what is love. So in reality you are not praying to the "Thou," the separation, you are praying to that which is within you. And awakening that which is within you. These are the mechanics. And you become loving. When you t hink of Divinity as all compassion, and having your thoughts tuned to that, you automatically become compassionate. Sunday mornings we are at home and we hear the church bells ringing. What strikes me immediately is of the glory of God, and I hear Him spe aking in the sound of those bells. When I go to a Hindu temple, you have these bells outside and you ring the bell before you enter the temple. And that bell has such.... This is one of the basis of our gong meditation, although it is of Tibetan origin. Then that sound flows in your mind. It becomes a kind of mantra. That sound flows in the mind. And by allowing it with total innocence, without fighting against it, by allowing it to flow in the mind, your mind becomes quieter and quieter and you get i nto the mood for that devotion and that worship to the "Thou" concept. So concepts are also very, very important to the one on the path. But here is one mistake that most people make is this, that they find that the mood is the sum total. It is not. It is nice to get into that mood, into that frame of mind, but that remains only in the mind and only in the concept. But it is a help. It is a help. And what has to be done and here is where one loses the "I" and "Thou" sense and finds the sense of one ness is when you go beyond the mood, when you transcend the mood. You start with the mood and slowly the mood would fade away. The "Thou" is not there. The "I" is not there. Only Divinity is there. Do you see how our teachings are so similar? For Christ said, "I and my father are one." And it does not only mean that little body of Jesus. It means all of us that are within this consciousness, for to me Christ means pure consciousness. See. So our teachings are no different at all. That from du ality we proceed to non duality. For to know God and to know the glory of God is to become one with Him, because God, or Divinity, can never be known. Because in the very process of knowing, the mind is involved. The mind is involved in the very process of knowing. You can only experience Divinity. You can only experience God, and that area of experience is beyond the mind. So you see, no difference in our teachings. No difference. It can only be experienced. Therefore people that have known God, to use that word for lack of a better word, they could never describe to you the glory and the majesty. For example, in communion. When I go into that samadhi, I could never explain to you. I could tell you a little about it. But I could never explain to you what it really is. It's like trying to explain colors to a person that's born blind. You cannot. So these eyes of blind people have to be opened, awakened, for them to experience and see the color themselves, to experience the glory of Divinity. A nd to experience the glory of Divinity is to be one with the Divine. And therefore you are Divine. You can never become one with the Divine if Divinity is not there in you. The entire, I've said this many times, the entire tree is in the seed. And if the tree was not in the seed, there would be no tree. So in all of nature in the entire univers e

4. U S 81 - 5 Divi nity exists in an involved form and in evolved form. The tree exists in the seed in an involved form. And when it grows it is in an evolved form. And yet the same energy is existent in the seed as in the full grown tree. So even in the conceptual God, e ven thinking that God is all powerful and all majestic and glorious is also true, for whatever your mind thinks, happens. For that very glory and energy is there even in the thought. What is needed is the materialization of the concept. Hindus believe that their God has four arms. Okay. When they reach that stage of actually being in the presence, they will see God with four arms. They will. The Moslems believe that if you live a good life here, you know, abstaining from drink and women and all kinds of things, then when you pass over, having lived a good life, you'll go to a heaven where there'll be rivers of wine and houris looking after you, tending you. Houris: pretty damsels, fairies, angelic, they'll be looking after you. So deny yourself here to get that up there. And believe you me, when that Moslem dies that is exactly what he is going to find. Yes. If some Christian people, there aren't many that believe this, that there is an old man, a kindly old man, sitting up there i n Heaven, with a whole lot of bookkeepers writing up everyone's debits and credits. They believe in that St. Peter standing at the gate chucking you out or letting you in. And if he firmly believes that, that is exactly what he is going to find. S o the glory you speak of, the majesty you speak of, is in your mind. And you can bring that concept to its actualization. See. That is how it works. Whatever you believe, that shall be so. And so be it! And this applies in daily life. You get up in the morning and you say, "Oh, I feel so rotten today. I feel so sick." Believe you me, you are going to feel sick. But get up in the morning, Gloria, and say, "No, I'm fine today. Yeah. Feeling well." GLORIA: [INAUDIBLE] GURURAJ: And you will be well. Gloria, glory. How beautiful. Ah! Nice. Nice. Nice. See. Now, that is the glory of God. Not apart from you, but within you and within your concept. But then the question would arise, "What is the real God behind the glorified God?" Because if you have a concept of some thing higher than you, it must be glorious. Why must it be glorious? Why must it be all compassionate? Because you feel within yourself that you are unglorious, that you are uncompassionate; therefore you got to have as your ideal something that you are not. And that is good, because that will make you aspire to reach that. So all these concepts become symbols in man's mind which can be actualized and brought to reality. And that is the personalized god that I always speak about. That is the Buddha. That is the Krishna. That is the Christ. But there is a step beyond. There is a step beyond. And that step is the impersonal God without quality, without quality or quantity. An impersonal energy that motivates, activates, and energizes the glory of t he personalized god. And that is

5. U S 81 - 5 the area man has to reach. In other words, "I and my Father are one" means that this energy that makes up my little individual self has now merged away into the energy of the universal self. Now, energy is not the right word, because to talk of these things the dictionary would never have the proper vocabulary. And that is the true mergence. So you merge first into the personal god, and step further you merge into the impersonal God where you become totally universal. The little I is then totally lost. Merging into the personal god, the god of our concept, the "I" and "Thou" will always remain. There is a togetherness and yet a separation, because being a concept, the mind is still involved. And as long as mind rem ains, you can only reach the personal god as any bhakta would reach, any devoted person would reach. But there you are still bound by the laws of opposites. For whenever any quality is applied it will always have its opposite . Compassion, yes. There wi ll always be non compassion. Kindness, yes. But there will always be cruelty. Like that. So that personal god has all the attributes. And when one speaks of a positive attribute it also has the opposite attribute. Now, that does not mean it is wrong, because this universe can never function without the laws of opposites. So the personal, glorious god is one with attributes. He represents the totality of that energy which emanates from this universe. Everything is vibrant. Everything is vibrating. Every individual here is vibrating according to his evolutionary standard. Now, you go to one city and you don't like the city. Why? If you are at a certain stage of evolution and you go to a particular city which is not, perhaps, a good city according to your... incompatible to your vibrations, then you would not like it. Why? It is not because of the buildings that are there or the gardens and the scenery and whatever. It is because of the emanations that are there. Because all the people involved t here might be bent towards a lot of permissiveness. And then all of these vibrations are totaled up into a collective consciousness, and which, being incompatible to you, you want to get away. That is why many people like to get away from the cities and go into the country, you see, where there are natural vibrations not interfered with by too many people's thoughts and too many people's vibrations. You see. That's why you want to get away to the country. That's the real reason, underlying reason. It' s not running away from the job or the home. But you want to, inwardly, subconsciously you want to get away to something more purer. So now as every town has a collective consciousness, collective vibration, so has every city, so has this world and so has this solar system, this galaxy and millions of galaxies that forms this universe and all has this vibrations. And the sum totality of the vibrations of this universe is the glory of the creation of the personalized god. You see. So from the personal th at is not the end. That is not the end. But from there just a step more you reach the impersonal, which is attributeless. You see. Which is attributeless. Man creates the personal god, but the impersonal God manifests the personal god. Do you get th at? It's very important to understand this concept. Man creates the personal god and gives him all the glory and all the majesty and all the

6. U S 81 - 5 compassion. That is why when the great personage descends to Earth he finds it very hard. That is what we know as the suffering of Christ also. Here in that freedom, enjoying the totality of the vibratory value of the entire universe, he has to condense all those energies into a little frame. Going through... from that vast, like a funnel, vast funnel, like an ic e cream cone, this vastness, to that little outlet down here which is the body. And those are called, in Sanskrit, the avataras or t he incarnations of God. So this is true and totally possible. And yet having come down in this little frame, he is subject ed to the laws of opposites that govern this particular world. This particular world. And he's involved in all these various laws. He has to, otherwise he can't function as a normal human being. And they show their normality, ordinariness in so many ma ny different ways. And people do not really understand what is meant: eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth. No. They don't believe in that. Jesus tells the prostitute, " I forgive you, my daughter. But sin no more. Be on your way." He wines and dines wi th the Pharisees, the moneylenders. Why? Because he knows that this world will always have that. Will always have that. And there is a certain percentage only that could be brought to a deeper understanding of the glorious life to preserve the balance. There has to be that balance or the see saw will just rock up and down and up and down and up and down. A certain equilibrium has to be maintained. And there comes a time in history, in our time, man's measured time, when there is greater weight on one side because of the totality of vibrations, emanations created here. Then that avatara takes on birth again to bring about the balance. It's like that story I told you during the week of the ten farmers. It is becaus e of his vibrations that the other ni ne were not struck by lightening. But when he was thrown out and when he walked away, the lightening struck those in the temple. You see. So a balance has always to be preserved within conflicting values of the world's function and world's functioning. And that is the glory of God. That is the glory because through that glory, through that compassion, an equilibrium is maintained to a greater or lesser degree. When things become totally bad, then from age to age, as the Gita would say, he is born agai n and again. Same energy in different forms. And that energy of the personalized god represents the sum totality of the emanations of this universe. Now, in this universe people say that man is the highest creation. And that's one of the biggest bluffs one can think of. In this world, yes, perhaps, because we have thinking ability. But as far as the universe is concerned, no. There are other planets in the universe that you can go to while still in this body through deeper and deeper meditational pract ices, where people are much more highly evolved than us. So if you reach the limitation, if you have reached the entirety of the limitation of what this world can provide for you and how far it can let you go in normal ordinary evolution, then you would s urely be born onto a planet that has people of a much higher vibratory level of existence. And the higher the vibration, the greater the evolution. There are planets in this universe where verbal communication is not even necessary. It just works on you think something and I have the thought, and a response is made instantly. There are other planets where

7. U S 81 - 5 there's not so much hate, where there's far far greater love. So the entire universe being connected to each other, every atom being connected, our h atreds here is balancing their love, and their love is balancing our hatreds. You see. So there always has to be this balance all the time. All the time. Two thousand or five thousand years ago people were the same as they are today. They still had the ir covetousness, avarice, selfishness, and these things. It was there all the time. Today man has advanced a lot technologically. That doesn't mean that man has evolved more. No. With this technology... the technology can be used for greater destructi on. And that we find. We see this in the world all the time. Look at the turmoil in the world, riots and killings here, there a nd everywhere. Everywhere. So some spiritual force must arise to bring about a balance to avoid entire destruction of this p lanet, for it will have a reverberating effect on the entire universe. First, this whole solar system can be disrupted. And then the reverberations would extend to the entire galaxy. And on and on and on it goes. Do you see. That is why all these theo logies, all these teachings are necessary. All these theologies are necessary because all people don't have the same temperament of mind. What we do in our teachings is to sum up the totality of all these theologies and go down to basic truths and th en follow your path. That is what we do. And all these happenings in this world is none else but the glory of God. None else. Everything is glorious. The worst person that we could conceive of is glorious too, is glorious. Perhaps a piece of pure iron covered with a bit of rust. And what's wrong with the rust? The poor piece of iron was laying outside and weathered all the storms, rain and sunshine. Been through purgatory for all this rust to gather there. What's wrong with that? And therefore we have pity for the so called downfallen. You see what beautiful purpose all these things serve? It is all glory. Nothing but the glory of God. Every happening is because of the glory of God. And then when we reach the impersonal God, all this seems such a play. It is just a play. A dream from which we have awakened. Because that impersonalized God into which we finally merge away knows of no attributes. You are beyond all attributes. And when you go beyond attributes all this seems like a dream that we have passed through. How real and vivid a dream is while we are in it! A tiger is chasing you, or a murderer is chasing you and you feel that fear within you. And that is what we are doing: dreaming. We are dreaming. We are involved in a cosmic dr eam. That too is the glory of God. But to be awakened is to merge away into that Impersonal where the dream just ceases and all begins all over again in the next cycle. Everything happens in cycles. One cycle starts and ends and another cycle begins, bu t to end again. And that is the glory of God, forever an ongoing process. An ongoing process. So if it is a forever ongoing process, it is eternal. And that is why even the personalized god is eternal, and you are eternal too. And no theology disputes this. In the path of devotion, as we said during this week, you reach the stage where you feel insignificant. But to go a step further and feel that you are all significant. For Divinity always has the last say. Always has the last say. And who is

8. U S 81 - 5 rea lly saying it? You are saying it without words. The inexpressible last word. So that was the word in the beginning, and the end too is the word. The word is God. Unspoken, unheard, but so deeply experienced, so deeply felt. And then there's still a st ep further. [END SIDE ONE] GURURAJ: [SLAPPING SOUND] I like the punctuation right at the right time. [LAUGHTER] The glory of God, huh? Yes. Do you see glory of God. You know, I was in a home once, and early in the morning I heard this chant. You know. The hostess was chanting and her voice drifted up to my bedroom. I was just getting out of my meditations, and I heard such a beautiful, sweet voice, "Aim hrim krim c hamunda ye ve che che. Aim hrim krim chamunda ye ve che che. Aim hrim krim chamunda ye ve che che." That sound was drifting up. So when I came downstairs, I said, "This is very beautiful, young lady. It is very nice you start your day off in this puri ty of mind." Because the chant purifies the mind, takes away, sweeps. Every morning one has to sweep the house. Start off sweeping, cleaning the mind. Very good. So she tells me, she says, "Guruji, I'm glad you like my chant, but I am sorry to tell yo u I use it for a different purpose." I say, "What?" She says, "Two rounds for soft boiled eggs, [LAUGHTER] and five rounds for hard boiled eggs." [LAUGHTER] You know, talking... just one last one. We have to go for lunch. There was a guru who liked playing golf, golfing guru. [LAUGHTER] Nothing wrong. Why musn't gurus also have games? I love playing games. I'm playing the universal game all the time. Someone asked me, "Do you swim?" I say, "I don't need to learn to swim, I'm swimming all the ti me in this universal ocean." Good. Fine. So this guru who loves playing golf was playing golf with a senior person about forty years his senior. And this, you know, senior citizen was a good golfer and really beat the hell out of the guru. Yeah. So th e guru, going back to the clubhouse, felt so despondent. So the senior citizen says, "Don't be despondent. Guruji, don't be despondent, because you will still have the last word when I die." So the guru replies, "But you will still have the last hole: yo ur own hole." [LAUGHTER] You'll still have your own hole. **** END ****